The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British sister agency of the National Security Agency, captured e-mails of some journalists out of 70,000 message intercepted in 10 minutes during a November 2008 test.

According to The Guardian, which on Monday cited some of its Snowden documents as its source (but did not publish them), the e-mails were scooped up as part of the intelligence agency’s direct fiber taps.

Journalists from the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Sun, NBC, and The Washington Post were apparently targeted.

"The e-mails appeared to have been captured and stored as the output of a then-new tool being used to strip irrelevant data out of the agency’s tapping process," the paper reported. "New evidence from other UK intelligence documents revealed by Snowden also shows that a GCHQ information security assessment listed 'investigative journalists' as a threat in a hierarchy alongside terrorists or hackers."

The Guardian quoted one document as saying that “journalists and reporters representing all types of news media represent a potential threat to security,” adding that “of specific concern are ‘investigative journalists’ who specialize in defense-related exposés either for profit or what they deem to be of the public interest.”

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar